“Aspiring
sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the
Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation
and the threat or use of force as means of settling international
disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding
paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential,
will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will
not be recognized.”

- Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution

I met Eduardo
and Lilly Zaragoza two years ago at an event I was singing at, the
annual fundraising dinner of the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center.
Eduardo was 79 years old at the time. A short, gentle, quiet man, he
had joined the US Navy at the age of 17 and was sent off to occupy the
defeated nation of Japan. One month after the dropping of the atomic
bomb on Nagasaki, his ship docked in the port, beside the many melted,
ruined ships that sat lifelessly in the harbor. He and his shipmates
took a walk around the annihilated city, the vast expanse of charred
and melted rubble that used to be the city of Nagasaki. On that day,
Eduardo joined the ranks of what the Japanese call the hibakusha,
radiation survivors.

His life has never been the same since. No matter how much he has tried
to forget, the nightmares of the visions he saw have never ceased. The
masses of bloated bodies floating in the water. The horribly burned,
disfigured, screaming survivors in the makeshift hospital wards he
visited. Like the rest of the hibakusha, Eduardo was mentally scarred
by what he saw. His body has also never been the same. The symptoms of
what we now know as radiation sickness began on his first day off the
ship. When I met him, he and his wife were both struggling with cancer.

Eduardo and Lilly described to me how they had had four
children, not including the miscarriages. One was stillborn. Two others
died of the same rare disease as young adults. Their last surviving
child was suffering from cancer when I met them. Both of them came from
families with a history of longevity and no history of cancer.

Eduardo was one of many thousands of US soldiers who were purposefully
exposed to nuclear radiation. Many of the others, in experiments easily
worthy of the Nazi Dr. Mengele, were ordered to walk through desert
areas where nuclear bombs had just been exploded. The horrifying
results on their fragile human bodies were quite predictable, just as
predictable as the military’s denials of reality.

Corbin Harney died of cancer last month at the age of 87. Untold
numbers of other hibakusha in what we now call the Southwestern United
States did not live to such a ripe old age, but Corbin was special, he
was a Western Shoshone medicine man, from a long line of medicine men.
Corbin was a veteran of World War II. Upon returning home, his reward
for his service was for his home, the Western Shoshone Nation, to
become, technically, the most bombed nation on Earth. He was to spend
most of his adult life campaigning against nuclear testing in his
homeland, the area now generally known as Nevada.

Corbin believed in the healing power of natural hot springs, among
other things. I met him at his home, the Poo Bah ranch, in Nevada near
the California border. For decades, Corbin got up before dawn every
morning to greet the sun in a ceremony to which anybody was invited to
join. The ceremony always began with Corbin playing a drum in front of
a small fire. When people gathered with him around the fire, on the
morning I joined him, like thousands of other mornings, he alternated
between singing in his Shoshone language and speaking in English about
the importance of the different elements of life.

He spoke first about the dark, and how important that was, how
everything needs to rest, how the light comes from the dark, and how
important the dark was “in the times when we were
hunted” by the white invaders, to hide. He spoke about the
rocks, how they are all alive, how some of the rocks are radioactive,
which is fine, as long as they are left in the ground where they
belong. He spoke about the wind, and the wind gusted. He spoke about
the light, and just then, the sun poked up above the horizon. He spoke
about the rain, and in this arid desert, for a few brief seconds, right
then, the rain fell.

A few days before Corbin died on July 10th, he joked with his friends
and relatives present that he would die at 11:00. Not to
anyone’s surprise, he kept his word. After he died, his
relatives saw four dog soldiers appear from the fog outside his window
to take him away. I believe them.

I remember reading in a book how there was a brief period when the
Indians were more or less left alone, near the beginning of the 20th
century. After decades of “shoot on sight”
genocidal warfare against the Indian nations of the west, after the
lifeblood of so many people, the buffalo, were systematically
slaughtered nearly into extinction by the Army and the settlers, after
the last of the free Indian people were driven at gunpoint onto barren
reservations and then starved to death en masse by corrupt government
officials, there was a brief time when they were allowed to try to
survive on their barren reservations. A brief period where although the
buffalo were gone, their land was stolen, their previous means of
livelihood were robbed of them, at least they were not being
slaughtered by the Army.

Then on the Lakota and Navajo reservations and elsewhere, oil, coal and
uranium were discovered. For so many hundreds of thousands of people
ever since then, life has once again been a nightmare of uranium and
coal mines, back-breaking labor, poisoning of the water, land, and air,
and premature death by cancer -- or by bullets, for daring to resist
the uranium-mining corporations, such as the dozens of unsolved,
uninvestigated murders of American Indian Movement activists in the
1970’s.

I remember reading somewhere that the cancer rate on
the Navajo reservation – where there are hundreds of uranium
mines, some closed, some still functioning, all toxic wastelands
– is eight times the national average. It was sometime after
that, in the early 1990’s, after the first US invasion of
Iraq, that I read another statistic, that the cancer rate in Iraq had
also risen by eight times what it had been before the invasion. And in
southern Iraq, where most of the US artillery had been fired and bombs
had fallen, so many of them full of “depleted”
uranium, vaporizing on impact, the cancer rate was far higher.

I write this from Japan, where I’m doing a concert tour. I
was unprepared for the extreme heat and humidity here, it’s
like Houston or New Orleans, and with climate change kicking in
it’s even hotter than usual. Seeking respite from the heat, I
found myself in my air conditioned hotel room in Hiroshima, reading
Robert Fisk’s most recent, magnificent book, The Great War
for Civilization. That day I was on the chapter about the
“Gulf War” and it’s aftermath. He
didn’t use the word, but Fisk was writing about
Iraq’s hibakusha, the innumerable children turning up at the
overstretched hospital wards of Basra with “rare”
cancers – children with leukemia (cancer of the blood), brain
cancer, young teenage girls with breast cancer. Cancers the experienced
Iraqi doctors had never seen in people so young, and certainly in
nothing like the kind of numbers they were having to deal with at that
time, and ever since then.

I arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport just about a month ago,
and witnessed the almost completely rebuilt megalopolis that is Tokyo,
and the seemingly unending expanse of cities surrounding it. During the
war with the US, almost every major city in Japan was bombed into
oblivion. Hundreds of thousands of children, women, senior citizens and
others were indiscriminately slaughtered from the air. A few cities
were being saved as potential A-Bomb targets, and the beautiful city of
Kyoto was the only major city to survive the war structurally intact.
After the USAF began running out of major cities to destroy, they
started bombing small cities and larger towns. Indiscriminately bombing
hospitals, schools, temples, churches, houses, entire neighborhoods
– and yes, factories, too. All this with
“conventional” weapons.

At my first hotel room there by the airport, NHK (Japan’s
equivalent of the BBC) was delivering the news, talking at length (with
English overdubs available at the push of a button for some of the
programs) about the earthquake that had just hit northern Japan before
I left Portland, and about the nuclear reactor – the
world’s largest in terms of electrical output -- that had
caught fire and leaked radioactive water as a result. Usually this time
of year northern Japan is bustling with visitors, but tourism in the
area over the next weeks was down by 90%, NHK said.

Apparently most Japanese
people didn’t believe the government’s assurances
that the radioactive leak was “insignificant.”
After all they’ve been through with radiation, it’s
easy to understand why.

On NHK they were also broadcasting the Asian Cup, the Asian version of
the World Cup, one of the most-watched sporting events on the planet.
(Except for in the US, where the 45 minutes of uninterrupted play make
soccer a commercially unviable sport for TV.) Iraq won, and in halting
English, the Iraqi team’s captain spoke out in front of the
world’s media against the US occupation of his country, and
said that after the game he was going to Qatar because it
wasn’t safe to live in Iraq. He spoke of some of his dead
friends and family members.

And
then it occurred to me, not for the first time, but there in Japan for
the first time, the thought hit me that the United States has been
bombing a nation somewhere in Asia for most of the past 66 years. So
soon after the virtual annihilation of Japan from the air, the USAF
went ahead and did the same thing in Korea, dropping even more bombs on
Korea than all sides in WWII combined, killing millions of innocent
people and half a million Chinese soldiers (did you even know, dear
reader, that we fought a war with China?).

In the same year that that war ended, we were sending in Theodore
Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit, to overthrow the
democratically-elected government of Iran, replacing him with one of
history’s most tyrannical dictators, the Shah, who was to
rule Iran with unspeakable brutality for the next quarter century.

Then a few years later we were to invade Vietnam,
completely destroying the country over the course of fifteen very long
years, in the course of which we also invaded Laos and Cambodia,
killing an estimated three million innocent civilians through
indiscrimate carpet-bombing of three countries, leading directly to the
insane Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia which then proceeded to kill so
many more. (And I wretch every time I hear yet another person in the US
say that “55,000 people died in Vietnam.” Just what
defines “people” to those who would utter such a
scandalous sentence?)
There are always pretenses for these invasions, and they are never
called invasions. We support dictatorships in the name of democracy,
overthrow democracies in the name of fighting
“communism,” and when that bogeyman no longer
inspired fear, then “terrorism” became the new
watchword. And every day, more people worldwide die in car accidents
than die in a year from non-state terrorism. Every day, more people die
from falling down the stairs than those who die in a year from
non-state terrorism. Every day, far more people die from breathing the
toxic air – of cancer – than those who die in a
year from non-state terrorism. But we invade countries and kill
millions to stop the “terrorists,” while we relax
environmental laws (in the name of “the economy”)
which results directly in the deaths of millions more.

And when people in “America” doubt the wisdom of
these invasions, when people raise questions about our government
spending more every year on “defense” than the rest
of the world combined while our cities are flooded, our bridges are
collapsing, and millions of our children are going to bed hungry, sick
and without health care, or the ability to read or write, we are told
that we mustn’t be “isolationist.” We are
told that there are “evil men” and “evil
regimes” in this world that we must stop before they acquire
nuclear weapons.

But they are mostly arming
themselves to defend themselves from a possible – even likely
– invasion by us. This is the historical reality, whatever
the pundits say, whatever the textbooks say, whatever the politicians
say. (And if you’d like to see the hard evidence, please pick
up a copy of Joseph Gerson’s excellent book, Empire and the
Bomb.)

Somehow we are never the ones who started it. Somehow we need to have
these 10,000 nuclear weapons, each one 1,000 times deadlier than the
bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. And if you don’t believe it,
they say, if our arguments about evil regimes and WMD’s and
democracy are not convincing, remember World War II. Remember Hitler,
remember the Nazi holocaust, remember the “Good
War.” (Now, if you believe that the US entered the war in
Europe to save my Jewish relatives then maybe you also believe that
we’re in Iraq to save the Kurds and the Shiites, and
I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Minneapolis, but
I’ll save that tract for another essay.)

Remember the Good War. Remember the Rape of Nanking, when Japanese
occupation soldiers raped and murdered their way through China, killing
an estimated 100,000 in Nanking alone. Remember Hitler, who
systematically killed millions in an orchestrated orgy of death unlike
anything the world had ever seen -- well, at least not since the Turks
and their Kurdish underlings did the same thing to the Armenians, with
nobody seriously doing anything to stop them, one short generation
earlier, during the dying throes of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

Systematic
killing of millions in an orchestrated, high-tech genocide, aimed at
wiping out entire populations of human beings.

Walking around the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the reminders of
the atomic bombings, and of the desire of the people of these cities
for a peaceful world free of nuclear weapons, are everywhere. On
plaques, in museums, in the parks. Everywhere I went, walking around
beneath the blazing sun that shines mercilessly, constantly, after the
rainy season ends every summer, I just kept getting the same cold,
eerie feeling I remember well from visiting the concentration camps
that have been preserved for posterity in Germany.

Visting Buchenwald I remember the feeling, how can such an unspeakable
horror as the Nazi holocaust possibly be represented effectively within
the walls of a building? How can pictures, videos, hair, shoes, teeth,
the few remains of the many dead, how can these things project the
scope of this nightmare? They can’t, really. But somehow,
being there – and I know I’m not alone in this
feeling – the ghosts are alive. Sit quietly for a few minutes
in Buchenwald and you can hear the screams of the dying, feel the
silence of the dead. The single candle burning in the middle of the
empty room in the former gas chamber, with the Jewish prayer for
forgiveness in the background, somehow communicates more than you might
imagine if you haven’t been there.

It’s like that in Hiroshima. Seeing the few
documentaries that ever make it onto TV in the US, hearing the
testimonies of the hibakusha who occasionally visit the country that
destroyed their cities and speak to the relatively few people who come
to hear them, just isn’t the same. These cities were wiped
out. They ceased to exist. Everything was gone. How can nothingness be
memorialized? It can’t.

But of the three steel-reinforced, concrete
structures in Hiroshima that partially survived the apocalypse of
August 6th, 1945, what is known as the Atomic Dome has been left as it
was on that day. Mostly destroyed, but still recognizable as a
building. Most of the concrete turned to rubble, steel beams bent like
straw, the inside completely gutted and burned long ago, when my
parents were children.

This is what happened to an earthquake-proof, steel-reinforced
structure. But this was a city of small wooden houses with clay tile
roofs. All around this dome for miles, in this city surrounded by
mountains, in this valley as far as the eye could see, were just
flattened houses. In and around those houses, 70,000 people died in a
matter of seconds, mostly women, children, and senior citizens.

Thousands more lived long enough – sometimes only a few
minutes, sometimes a few hours – to walk, naked, their
clothes having been burned off of them, their bodies charred black and
red, their skin hanging off of them like seaweed, their arms
outstretched, crying, walking on top of the collapsed houses of their
neighbors, stepping over the dead and dying, walking towards one of the
two rivers that flowed through the city. Many died before they got to
the river, others died once they got to the river, and the rivers
turned red from blood, and then black from radioactive ash that rained
down from the sky. There were so many bodies in the river that they
piled up and formed a huge dam.

Standing between those rivers, there in front of the dome at 3 am one
evening, the words of the hibakusha I had had dinner with earlier came
back to me. They were recounting the bits that they remembered, that
trauma-induced amnesia had not obliterated. Every time was like
reliving the experience, but they felt duty-bound to tell the stories
to those who would listen.

Dr. Shoji Sawada was 13 when the bomb fell. He was sick that day, and
unlike most people in Hiroshima, at 8:15 am he was not up and about,
but was in bed, shielded by walls from the initial flash of light that
burned tens of thousands of people to a crisp instantly. Shoji suddenly
found himself covered in the rubble of his house, but managed to squirm
out from under it.

Then he heard his mother
calling.

He looked around and couldn’t see her. Then
he realized she was beneath him, pinned underneath a smoldering beam of
wood. He tried with all his might to move the beam, but it was far
beyond his physical abilities. He looked outside for help, but everyone
around him was dead or dying.

He went back in and tried to
move the beam again, to no avail.

The initial blast was as hot as the sun, which is what
instantly killed anybody within a kilometer of it who was directly
exposed, and most people within several kilometers of it.

Immediately following this was a massive gust of wind
many times stronger than the strongest typhoon, which is what flattened
all the houses and snapped all the trees like toothpicks (leaving only
parts of those few aforementioned steel structures, and a number of
smokestacks, their cylindrical shape protecting them from the blast of
wind).

Just after the wind, Shoji-san explained, everything combustible
immediately caught fire. With the flames lapping at his legs, unable to
move the beam of wood, he said, “forgive me,
mother,” and ran towards the river.

“Study hard and be a
good student,” were her last words.

And then she was burned to death, as her son survived
the rest of the day in the river, surrounded by what can only be
described as hell on Earth. Every day he remembers his mother, and her
last words, and feels the pain and the guilt of the survivor once again.

Now multiply this
scene by 70,000.

This was premeditated, high-tech mass murder targeted at civilians.
Genocide. It was the Japanese holocaust. It was done to a country that
was in complete ruins, whose government was in the process of
attempting to surrender, but the “Allies” were
pretending not to hear these messages because they wanted to drop the
bomb first, to “send a message” to the Soviet
Union, among other reasons. It was done to a country that had virtually
no functioning industry. Yes, Mitsubishi had an armanents factory in
Hiroshima, I learned from a visit to the museum there, but what the
museum didn’t mention was that the workers were going there
and waiting for parts which never arrived. Japanese industry was
essentially totally crippled by the summer of 1945. There was no
military value to the city of Hiroshima – even if having
military value could possibly justify slaughtering 70,000 civilians.

Against
the advice of most of the top military brass, Truman and Churchill
connived to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, knowing full well that it
would result in indiscriminate death and destruction to an entire city.

And then they did it again, three days later, in Nagasaki, after the
Japanese emperor had personally become involved in attempting to
surrender to the “Allies,” under the same
conditions of Germany’s surrender at Potsdam. Incidentally,
the bomb over Nagasaki was dropped directly above the biggest
concentration of Catholics in East Asia, almost directly over the
biggest cathedral in East Asia, over a city that contained a POW camp,
and all this was known to Truman and Churchill and his advisors who
supported dropping the first and second bombs.

Completely annihilating one city full of civilians, and then doing it
to another – after raining down death from
“conventional” bombs indiscriminately throughout
almost every population center in the nation. This
“conventional” holocaust of unprecedented
proportions was carried out by “FDR,” that great
hero of the working class in the United States. Nuclear hell on Earth
was brought to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by that down-to-Earth hoosier who
never went to college, Harry Truman, and by his good friend Winston
Churchill, the man lionized in the history books for saving Britain
from Nazi tyranny. The fact that he also ordered the gassing of Iraqis
a few years earlier and supervised the firebombing of Dresden, Berlin,
Hamburg and most other major cities in Germany, himself responsible for
killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians, is usually
conveniently overlooked.

There
was no “Good War.”

Every war the US has been involved with since the
“American” Revolution has been a war for empire,
based on lies just as blatant as Colin Powell’s 31 lies he
presented to the UN a few short years ago, as the corporate media hung
on every ridiculous word. The victors write most of the histories, but
many other histories are out there, often out of print, growing mold on
the book shelves in the libraries of “America,”
rarely used. As a result, we are a nation made up largely of idiots
(thank you, Green Day). A Gallup poll two years ago asked people in the
US whether they thought the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was
“necessary” to end the war. 57% said it was. This
is beyond shameful, not to mention completely a-historical, proof of
the effectiveness of the bald propaganda of the victors of this
“Good War.”

What if you asked a modern-day German whether
they thought the holocaust was “necessary” --
perhaps “necessary” to garner support for the
German occupation from the largely anti-Semitic populations of the
nations of eastern Europe?

Even the very question would be appalling. Anyone
answering “yes” would be considered something akin
to a holocaust denier, some kind of monster, appropriately enough. What
if you asked a modern-day Japanese person if the rape of Nanking was
“necessary”? If he was a politician and answered in
the affirmative to this question he would probably be driven out of
office, just like Prime Minister Abe’s Defense Minister last
month.

No, the Japanese Holocaust was not “necessary.” By
any reasonable accounting of history, what was done to Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was a holocaust as horrible in scope as what the Nazis did to
Europe, except that it was carried out in a matter of seconds rather
than years. By any reasonable accounting of history, Harry Truman and
Winston Churchill were morally equivalent to Adolf Hitler. By any
reasonable accounting of history, those in charge of the US Air Force
were moral equivalents of the SS.

And why does it matter whether long-dead presidents were war criminals
or not? Because the cliché is true: if you don’t
understand history, you are doomed to repeat it. Because many of the
hibakusha in Japan and around the world are still alive, and they
deserve some ounce of dignity. Because if you believe the billionaires
that run this country are capable of fighting a “Good
War,” capable of defending the rights of the oppressed
somewhere in the world, you might believe they could do that again. But
they never have, they aren’t now, and they never will. Not in
Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Iran, not in Syria,
not in North Korea, nowhere.

They are running an empire -- a vicious, genocidal empire
that’s been dominating much of the world for many decades.
Kennedy was running it – he nearly ended life on Earth twice
in his short tenure as president. Eisenhower, the butcher of Korea, was
running it. Johnson, the butcher of Vietnam, was running it. Nixon, the
butcher of Cambodia, was running it. Clinton was running it –
he, like the rest, threatened to use nuclear weapons against both Iraq
and Korea. He said “nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of
our foreign policy.” His wife, Hillary, has also said
“all options are on the table.” And we hopefully
all know about Bush.

All of these people were (and in the case of the
Clintons and the Bushes, are) terrorists of the worst kind. They are
nuclear terrorists.

What they seem to have learned from history is that
it’s OK to kill and to threaten to kill millions of innocent
civilians – and to risk the lives of billions more, including
hundreds of millions of vulnerable people inside the United States
– if they deem that it serves their interests.

What is clearly in our interests – and certainly in the
interests of other human beings around the world – is to rise
up against these “democratic” despots. If there is
any possibility of redeeming the soul of this place we call
“America,” this madness must be stopped. We may
have exported our entire manufacturing base to China, but the weapons
of mass destruction (and most of our “conventional”
weapons) are still made in the USA.

The functioning of the government requires the consent of the governed.
It can and must be withdrawn. One by one, or hopefully, in our
millions. The most important lesson of history, the one that the rulers
of “America” most want to keep from us, is that
mass movements can achieve everything. That another world is possible.
That democracy is in the streets. And that “evil”
does not usually come in the form of a frothing-at-the-mouth dictator.

Evil, as has been pointed out before, is more often banal. Evil pays
taxes. Evil pushes papers. Evil designs missiles, programs computers.
Evil drops the bombs, but evil also sits by while others do that, and
evil watches and fails to act. Evil is silent. Evil is patriotic. Evil
waves a flag. Evil writes lying propaganda for textbooks and
newspapers. Evil believes that genocide could possibly be excusable,
let alone “necessary.”